StartableStartableStart up lessons learnt and still learning.2016-07-21T15:28:21Zhttp://www.startable.com/feed/atom/WordPressHealy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=23352016-07-21T15:28:21Z2016-07-21T15:28:21ZCareer update: I’ve just joined ForUsAll, a technology driven 401(k) provider focused on the small business market. This is a big move for me, and I enjoyed my 2+ years at Sunrun. My new role is pretty similar in responsibilities to what I did at Boundless and OfficeDrop – I’ll be running our marketing team.

The Company is still looking for talented folks right now, and you can see open positions on the ForUsAll Linkedin Page. If you are a talented developer or salesperson, or are interested in operations, please check it out! You can also visit our AngelList page.

The ForUsAll Vision

Our goal is nothing short of changing America’s retirement landscape. According to our CEO, we face a $6 trillion retirement funding shortfall. The retirement industry has been too more focused on self-enrichment via excessive fees – to the point where the Department of Labor has recently stepped in with new regulations aimed at reducing these abuses. We re-imaging the 401(k) from the ground up using design and modern technology. Read our CEO’s open letter to the retirement industry on our new Medium page. You can also learn more about ForUsAll in this news article.

Since it pumps me up, I’ll actually quote our CEO in his Medium post:

“After years of servicing Fortune 500 companies and their 401(k)s at Financial Engines, we were struck by how the smaller guys (SMBs) were getting the short end of the stick. We didn’t buy into the notion that people need to work for a Fortune 500 company in order to have a great retirement. That’s why we founded — and named — our company ForUsAll.

We’re not the only ones that want to bring big company expertise and insights to the SMBs. Venture capital firm Foundation Capital was instrumental in helping Financial Engines get off the ground in the ’90s to revolutionize Fortune 500 companies’ retirement plans, and we’re teaming up with them again — but this time for the smaller guys. Like us, Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital operates at the intersection of technology and design and recently led our Series A round of $9.5M.”

I hope to be able to post more about what I’m learning and my strategies over on healyjones.com. Follow me there to get updates!

]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=23292015-10-10T21:48:29Z2015-10-10T21:48:29ZWow, it’s been forever since I posted here. I do have some posts on my personal blog that are worth noting, including one on Facebook advertising and another on website testing.

I’ve also got some more personal posts – one on a homemade taco seasoning recipe that I use all the time, and another that is information on who Healy Jones is – I’m now running the acquisition marketing team at Sunrun, which means I run the demand generation group.

]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=23202014-06-28T22:39:41Z2014-06-28T22:39:41ZI’m still posting occasionally over at healyjones.com… but less and less here.
]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=23112014-02-19T19:23:59Z2014-02-19T19:23:59ZI continue to build out content on Healyjones.com and have recently put up two new posts – one on pricing page design and, finally, my first post on wines that I like.

]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=23082014-04-30T19:02:30Z2014-02-04T05:25:28ZI recently wrote about a great guide written by Google about advertising and writing good copy for Adwords advertising. For sure worth reading if you are spending money on Adwords!
]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=23052014-01-22T04:32:38Z2014-01-22T04:32:38ZI’m slowly adding content to my new Healy Jones blog at healyjones.com. I just want to have a place where I can post some personal stuff, plus also have some marketing material as well. I probably will cross-post here some, but not as frequently as I once did.
]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=22992013-12-18T18:44:53Z2013-12-19T08:37:29ZI came across this great infographic on iboxseo – it’s nicely lays out the tactics you need to get Google to love one of your site’s pages. I also really love the ranking factors they breakdown at the bottom of this blog post.

They list the top on page factors as:

Keyword use anywhere in title tag

Keyword use as the 1st word(s) of the title tag

Keyword use in the root domain name

Keyword use anywhere in the h1

Keyword use in internal or external link anchor text on the page

Keyword use in the first 50-100 words

It’s a great post; check out all the tips at the bottom of it!

]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=22972013-12-18T18:23:53Z2013-12-18T18:23:53ZBoundless today announced that the company had settled its lawsuit with the major textbook publishers – this is great news for students and professors who are looking to bring their educational content into the 21st century! Here is the blog post announcing the settlement.
]]>0Healy Joneshttp://www.startable.com/?p=22932013-11-14T19:25:25Z2013-11-14T19:20:53ZI just read a great post by David Skok on Managing Customer Success to Reduce Churn. One of the key points I love in his post is that measuring customer engagement does not give you the entire picture of your customer(s)’ happiness with your product, and does not correlate perfectly with expected churn rate. While it’s harder to do, measuring customer outcomes can provide a much better view into how likely a customer is to churn, and how much value/happiness they are getting out of your product.

I noticed this pattern at Boundless quite a bit – a number of our happiest users were minimally engaged with the product. That’s because the product met their needs efficiently in two key areas – price and efficacy. They not only paid less that they thought they would for their learning materials, but they also were able to read and retain their information quickly, without the need to heavily engage with the product. It took a while to figure this out, as we were carefully using analytics to track product usage. And once we saw that happiness and engagement were not highly correlated, but instead outcomes (good grades, efficient studying and the great price point) generated the customer happiness… well, then we were able to double down on the right product features and highlight the best selling points to new potential users.

It’s a great post – check it out!

]]>0Prasad Thamminenihttp://www.startable.com/?p=22762013-10-24T02:34:24Z2013-10-24T01:41:18ZI was recently talking to a co-founder of a leading social network and he asked what in my view are the qualities of a great product manager. I could think of three right away but I believe there are three more that are equally important. Since this is a question every person either responsible for hiring a product manager or works with a product manager wonders about, I thought I should share them with you. Here are the six qualities that make a great product manager:

Strategic Thinker

A product manager is a mini-CEO of sorts. He needs to understand the current product strategy and how it aligns with the overall company strategy. He needs to know the product vision, how it will generate customer value and what is the differentiating advantage over its competitors. Once a product manager gets this and is able to clearly articulate it, you would be surprised how the rest of the firm will rally behind it in order to build a winning product. For the product to be a long term success, he needs to envision how the product, industry and competition is going to evolve and develop a long term roadmap.

Passion for products

Product managers should love products. They should be able to recognize and respect great products. They should look at products and be able to tell what is good, what is inspiring and what can be improved. If the product manager is truly passionate about the product, it rubs of the entire team and leads to the development of great products.

Keep Score

In addition to knowing what the game is, a product manager should be able to keep score. Keeping score means identifying the right metrics and knowing when you have won. Winning means identifying the current baseline for the metrics and the goal the team would be shooting for in the next release. Once a product manager is able to accomplish this, everybody in the team will have clear understanding as to how the game is won. The team is rightfully aligned, motivated, inspired and innovative.

Ability to Prioritize

One of the key attributes of a product manager is to be able to prioritize the backlog. Once the product manager and the entire company knows what game is been played and how the score is kept and won, prioritizing becomes an easy task. The product manager needs to map the product strategy down to the individual features, and prioritize them in the right order across phases so as to maximize the winnings. If a product manager is able to do this well, all stakeholders within the company will buy into the prioritized backlog even though their pet features have not made the cut.

Collaborative leader

Building a product is a collaborative process and its take a product manager with collaborative nature to pull it off. Even though a product manager is the leader of the product, most of the people development team does not report to him. Moreover, product requirements come from various functional groups and customers and they all are considered important by those contributing them. In such an environment, a product manager cannot be dictatorial. He needs to be able to inspire others to follow him. He needs to be able to negotiate while prioritizing the backlog and appease all stakeholders. He needs to clearly communicate why a particular feature was chosen over an other one for the current release. At the same time he needs to be confident, assertive and at times lay down the law since the buck stops with the product leader.

Execution

Product managers need to be biased for action. They need to get things done. In order for a product to be shipped there are hundreds of things to get done and a product manager should be able to get down and dirty to get them done. He needs to QA, write marketing copies, edit HTMLs, mock up wireframes, and even do PR. A product manager needs to do anything needed to make the product a success.

At the end of the day, product manager need to make things happen. They should have the ability and qualities to rally the troops, sell them on the vision and march them to victory.